Etikettarkiv: italiensk litteratur

”I’m a storyteller. I’ve always been more interested in storytelling than in writing. Even today, Italy has a weak narrative tradition. Beautiful, magnificent, very carefully crafted pages abound, but not the flow of storytelling that despite its density manages to sweep you away. A bewitching example is Elsa Morante. I try to learn from her books, but I find them unsurpassable.”

”My women are strong, educated, self-aware and aware of their rights, just, but at the same time subject to unexpected breakdowns, to subservience of every kind, to mean feelings. I’ve also experienced this oscillation. I know it well, and that also affects the way I write.”

”The Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s gripping novels about the rich and complex lives of women — as mothers, daughters, wives, writers — have won her a devoted cult following. After several years of growing critical favor, her readership reached new levels this fall with the release of ‘Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,’ the third volume in her series of Naples novels, which recount the lifelong friendship of two women.”

‘”Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay’ is the story of a furious friendship, and the internal violence suffered by two women set against the turbulent landscape of a fractured Italy. Elena and Lila grow up, their lives converge and diverge, they have children, they share a passion for the same man, they leave their husbands. But essentially, this is a woman’s story told with such truthfulness that it is not so much a life observed as it is felt. The reader is ransacked and steps back into the world gingerly, with lingering questions about estrangement and belonging.”

”As soon as you read her fiction, Ferrantes restraint seems wisely self-protective. Her novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.”